Memphis Smokehouse

[fancycwabs]

In my ongoing quest to catalog every barbecue place in Memphis, this evening I visited Memphis Smokehouse.

When I first moved out to the suburbs, this shopping center location housed a Lone Star Steakhouse--one of any number of "Texas-themed" places that serve galvanized buckets of salted in the shell peanuts, which is a staple crop I don't normally associate with Texas, but that's not important because they closed several years ago as several other peanut restaurants sprung up within a few miles. The next thing I knew, there was a restaurant called Yazoo's in the location, and though I only ate there once, I was reasonably pleased with the food and service, although the menu seemed a little wide-ranging (having to keep an inventory with which to make thirty different menu items can't be efficient). Yazoo's didn't last very long, closing after about a year.

A few weeks ago, driving by the place, I noticed a sign change:

Which would seem to indicate that the owners were looking to infiltrate the already pretty saturated Memphis barbecue market, with a sign that looked like it was a chain (I haven't located another one, so I think it's one-of-a-kind, for the moment)

Strolling up to the door, one is greeted with a barbecue-circuit trailer smoking rig.

Wood's usually a good sign--though it doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna get exquisite barbecue, it usually means you're not gonna get pork roast and barbecue sauce.

The interior had changed little from its days as a Lone Star Steakhouse, although there were no peanuts. The same booth arrangement, the same bar arrangement, and lots of televisions. The menu has the same wide-ranging weakness as Yazoo's did; for a place that's named to be a barbecue restaurant there's a whole lot of salad and pasta and assorted appetizers to be found. They may all be fantastic, but I have a feeling that a lot of them will end up sitting in the walk-in cooler for a week before anyone decides to order 'em.

The tables are condimented for barbecue, however.

I didn't try the dry rub, which is more often than not more salt and paprika than anything, but the sauce (thin, not too sweet, a little vinegary) and the hot sauce (actual hot sauce, not a hot version of the barbecue sauce--fairly mild by hot sauce standards, which isn't a bad thing) are both pretty good.

As befits a good comparison in a town where barbecue sandwiches are the staple, I ordered a barbecue sandwich, and suddenly became a ravenous beast when it arrived and ate half of it before I remembered to take a picture.


The bun was toasted, the meat was smoky, pulled, and unsauced, the slaw on the sandwich wasn't anything spectacular. All in all, it was pretty good, but not something that would warrant a special trip out to Bartlett. But if you were in the neighborhood (and it is in my neighborhood, sorta), you could do a whole lot worse.

The menu also includes steaks, catfish, ribs, barbecued chicken, and various combinations thereof. Hopefully, it'll end up a solid neighborhood eatery with several repeat customers, but I don't know that it's gonna become the barbecue megalith that, say, Corky's has become. Not that that should be a particular source of pride for a restaurant.

Comments

[redtheblue.livejournal.com]

Is Corky's brown syrup parading as barbecue sauce the norm or exception in Memphis? I would hope the exception. You could use it on pancakes.